For an entire year, the story waits patiently in the Haggadah to whisper powerful secrets in our ears on seder night.
Though the words have remained unchanged for the last 3,336 years, the Passover message to Jewish people worldwide offers nuances annually, its ageless wisdom illuminating the Jewish experience of that exact moment.
The Torah tells them to mark this momentous experience “in the month of springtime,” which this year begins on Saturday night, April 12, with the first (and for Israelis, the only) seder and runs eight days through the evening of April 20. In Israel, the holiday lasts seven days.
Down through the ages, Jews have gathered with family and friends on the night of the Passover seder to relive their people’s most dramatic and defining moment: No less than the Master of the Universe rescuing the Israelites from 210 years of back-breaking and soul-killing slavery at the hands of the cruelest of Egyptian pharaohs and his whip-cracking taskmasters.
But even now, as Jews around the globe prepare to celebrate freedom from Egyptian slavery, the message that Passover delivers strikes at the heart of what it means to be a Jew in 2025 (5785 in the Hebrew calendar).
What does it mean to know that 59 people, living and dead, are being held captive in the Gaza Strip by a terror organization—and have been for nearly 18 months while the world waits and watches? That Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran and other rogue entities seek Israel’s destruction … yet again.
To put a finger on this pulse, JNS asked eight people to speak at this time in Jewish history about what exactly the Haggadah can teach right now.
Shmuley Boteach
Jaws dropped back in 1998 when Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion appeared, written by an Orthodox rabbi, no less. And with more than two dozen other books having followed, the most recent being Good Mourning. Finding Meaning in Grief and Loss and a long association with Oprah Winfrey and other stars, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach has been dubbed by Newsweek as “the most famous rabbi in America.”
But something upset him during a recent visit to London. A young man dug a Magen David necklace out of his shirt. “When I asked him why he doesn’t wear it on the outside, he told me: ‘Because I’m afraid,’” says Boteach. “When Passover is the festival of liberation and freedom, but Jews are taking down their mezuzahs and are afraid to wear a Magen David or a kippah in public, are we truly free, or are we back to being slaves?”
But the rabbi also points to some hopeful signs. “Maybe this Passover with the IDF courageously fighting back against Hamas, the new sanctions against Columbia University, showing other schools that they can’t get away with antisemitism anymore either, and pushbacks against the Hadid sisters and other notorious antisemites, maybe now we will recommit to proudly displaying the signs of our religion on our bodies and our homes.”
With a glance back at our ancestors fleeing Egypt, “we know a slave could never look his master in the eye, and kill his god and smear the blood on the doorpost of his house, so that meant that at that moment we were no longer slaves but free men and women. We can learn from them how today we can be free Jews, proud Jews.”
Michael Levy
For the Levy family, the holiday of freedom has never been as poignant as it is this Passover since Michael Levy’s little brother, Or Levy, was released from the tunnels of Gaza a mere two months ago. Or was taken hostage from the Supernova Festival on Oct. 7, 2023, and his 32-year-old wife, Eynav, was among the more than 1,200 Israelis murdered that day.
“He’s back home with his 3-year-old son, and slowly, he’s regaining his strength and his weight. But after 491 days in captivity, it will take time,” says this big brother, who is 42 to Or’s 34. “I remember the day he was born, and when he came home in February, I felt he was born all over again.”
Though this seder will be a great cause for celebration for the Levy family, their joy is incomplete, he says.
“Last Passover, when Or was still a prisoner, we didn’t even want to have a seder, but I have three daughters, and we felt bound to do it for them. So yes, this year we can finally celebrate with him,” says Levy, who spoke before the U.N. Security Council two months before his brother’s release.
Still, the holiday has its dark side, he insists: “We’re still missing the 59 others, and we’ve become very close with their families over this time. Not until they’re all back home can we really feel complete.”
Miriam Peretz
Indeed, Israel’s struggles since Oct. 7, along with the steep rise in global antisemitism, have brought Israelis and Jews around the world together in unprecedented ways. So says Miriam Peretz, who lost two sons to Israel’s wars—Uriel in 1998 and Eliraz in 2010—and subsequently became an outspoken force for Jewish unity as a public speaker, author and candidate for president in 2021. (She lost to Isaac Herzog).
“On Passover, we sit together as families, but also in our hearts, we need to remember we are one large family: the right and the left, the religious and the secular because if there is a time we need to be united, this is it.
“We must feel around our tables the widows and orphans since Oct. 7 and still choose life and refuse to give up,” adds Peretz, winner of the 2018 Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement. “And we must promise never again to engage in dishonorable discourse with each other but celebrate that which unifies us. And we must remember that Hamas can deny the hostages food and showers, but they cannot take away their freedom to believe that they will all soon be back home with their families.”
When in every generation an enemy rises up to destroy the Jewish people, says Peretz, “we tell this story of freedom, and we stand up and fight for our people and our God, and do acts of kindness for one another. Then somehow, we survive and we even flourish.”
Rabbi Mendy Alevsky
The story Jews have been commanded to tell their children over the generations is very much on the mind of Rabbi Mendy Alevsky, who, with his wife, Sara, runs the Chabad at Case Western University in Cleveland. “With antisemitism at an all-time high, the last couple years have been a wake-up call for the Jewish people,” he says. “They have shown us that assimilating and trying to be like everyone else isn’t working. Here on campus and around the world, it’s become blindingly clear that we need to go back to basics.”
Along comes the Passover seder as the biggest opportunity of the year for parents and grandparents to inspire their children about the Jewish past, present and future. “When they can truly convey its amazing power, the story comes alive,” he says.
The bonus, continues the rabbi, “is when your kids see that you’re willing to grow Jewishly with sincerity and commitment, it shows them it’s OK to be vulnerable and grow their Jewish self, too. It’s what I tell my students: The best way to be safe is not trying to get validation from others but to be a proud Jew who understands we’re God’s ambassadors to the world.”
Pinchas Gutter
This view of the seder as a memory-maker resonates with Pinchas Gutter, whose most iconic seder was the one of April 19, 1943, when his father was one of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto who held a seder in a bunker they built under a bombed-out house. It was a dangerous time and place to be a Jew. Of the original 400,000 Jews sent there more than two years earlier, Gutter’s family was among the 60,000 Jews remaining alive in the ghetto.
“Every year when Pesach arrives, I can only think of that night when I was 10,” says Gutter, who now lives with his family in Toronto. “My father was a winemaker who had saved a few bottles of wine, and a baker secretly made a few matzos, so each of us got a little bite,” he recalls. “Luckily, there were men who had memorized the Haggadah. That night, we all knew we were supposed to be sent to Treblinka so Warsaw would be Judenrein, free of Jews,” he recalls. “It was a crying seder.” And that night, April 19, the deadly Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began.
It wasn’t long before Gutter, along with his parents and twin sister Sabina, were deported to the Majdanek death camp in Poland, where the other three were murdered and where, claiming to be 16, he was sent to a series of five work camps and a death march until liberation from Theresienstadt at age 13.
A childhood under the Nazis has rendered Gutter incapable of watching the news out of Israel after Oct. 7. “I was an optimist for years because I believed things had changed, but now the graffiti on Jewish schools here in Toronto reminds me of Poland in the ’30s and the hostages trapped and suffering takes me back to the camps. Still, I can only tell my children and grandchildren that soon things will calm down and turn out better.”
Scott Manuel
Scott Manuel is about to celebrate his first seder as a Jew. The Kansas University junior began wondering about Judaism in high school when he worked on a project about the Holocaust.
“I remember thinking at the time that I wanted to learn more about this people and not just the war,” says Manuel, who soon found himself reading everything he could on Judaism. “I started thinking, ‘That’s what I believe, too. This is for me.’”
A Jewish studies course confirmed all this, and three years ago, Manuel began the formal process through the Conservative movement. In February, his conversion was complete. “My parents are pretty understanding,” he says. “I’m doing the best I can with kashrut for now, and I’m Shabbat observant, so we work around that.”
And this year, friends have invited him for his first “official” seder.
“Being embraced by the community, counting in a minyan for the first time, now people who were so far from me before are part of me,” he says. “It’s like having a new family, and everything I do now is for the Jewish community and not just for myself.”
Rav Judah Mischel
Rav Judah Mischel would no doubt see Manuel’s transformation as just one expression of how “Passover comes to awaken us to the Jewish nation’s eternal rebirth,” says the rabbi who lives in Israel but is executive director of Camp HASC, the Academy for Special Children in Parksville, N.Y. And whose insights into Passover fill the pages of the newly released The Baderech Haggadah.
“The Haggadah admits we’re going to suffer—we think of the [Spanish] Inquisition, the Warsaw Ghetto and now the tunnels of Gaza—but that God is going to deliver us with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and, as a free people we will once again thank the Creator for our unlikely, essentially impossible, survival.”
Passover has a way of hammering this lesson home, says Mischel. “No one forgets the sights, smells, tastes and sounds of seder night, where even the smallest child has a role to play, and each of us re-experiences our people’s flight to freedom in our own way.
“Now, here in Israel in a time of war and captivity, there’s a sense of exhaustion, and we know it’s not done. So when Pesach shows us the open miracle—we were in Egypt for hundreds of years, and then BAM! An amazing revelation of Hashem’s mercy and freedom. It reminds us to look forward with emunah—with ‘faith’—for the next miracle.”
Erica Brown
And, speaking of miracles, “on seder night, we celebrate the miraculous end of the Egyptian threat to our people,” says Erica Brown, author of Morning Has Broken: Faith After October 7th, and vice provost for Values and Leadership at Yeshiva University. “But even as we celebrate, we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why is this seder night different from all other seder nights? Is it the number of hostages who will once again not be with their families? Will we finally be at the end of this war and over this prolonged despair and torment?’”
One answer, says Brown, has to do with the second part of the seder.
“As we open the door for Elijah and say the verses that acknowledge an eternal threat to our people, we confront again that hate that continues to damage our Jewish bodies and souls,” she says.
At the same time, we recite these words after we’ve already eaten and celebrated our people’s freedom. This reminds us that, while there is still an enemy lurking, we cannot let hate overwhelm us. We need to strengthen the love we share and to use all our human agency for blessing.”